Motor City Online's (MCO) front-end design has presented a number of challenges to the twenty-plus artists who have worked on the game over the last three years. We needed to complement the 3D world's retro look of hotrods, hangouts and outlaw racing and take advantage of today's cutting-edge PC technology. So, we came up with a design that blends the familiarity of a "web-style" interface with 3D cars, world elements and in-game characters. The result is a unique hybrid that is, in our opinion, both intuitive and totally original in look and feel.

One of the biggest challenges has been integrating HTML parsing with the game's front end. While in-game HTML poses huge visual design challenges, it offers us the ability to pull in new content on the fly-including user-created materials like car paintjobs and screenshots-which can then be posted on live community pages in the game and simultaneously published out to the user website.

After MCO goes live, the front end will see occasional updates with new content and visual changes to keep the game fresh and growing. In preparation for this, we knew we'd need a set of tools that would let us make changes quickly. The art team worked closely with Wes Potter, our ace GUI programmer (he did all the hard work), to create a tool set that lets artists make all kinds of changes and get them into the game without having to bug the engineers.

3D Cars & Tracks

A Motor City car can take two or three months to build, a track (including geometry, textures, lighting and model population) can take well over a year. We have fifty completed base car models right now (all American classics and muscles, ranging in year from 1932 to the early 1970s) and we continue to build cars that will be available as free downloads after we ship. We've built 24 tracks so far including oval and grand prix circuit tracks, city and back road street tracks, and drag strips. We have a number of new tracks in the works for future download, including a couple stunt tracks that we're dying to finish!

Base level user technology has improved considerably since we started on the game three years ago. So, in the last few months we've been able to add some significant enhancements to the 3D racing environments and bring even more life to the race. We can now allow higher gameplay resolutions (up to 1600x1200), greater amounts of texture memory for our cars and tracks, and more advanced game effects. One really cool addition is 3D spectators along the tracks. For example, players will be able to notice a wide range of people in the audience that have some pretty hilarious animations.

One of the best things we've been working on lately is an upgraded feature set for our car-building tool. The goal is to release the tool to the public as soon as possible so that players can create custom paintjobs and car models, which can then be submitted to official MCO contests. According to the producers, players who win these contests will actually earn award money that they can spend in Motor City.